Perception and awareness of accents in young children

@article{Girard2008PerceptionAA,
  title={Perception and awareness of accents in young children},
  author={Fr{\'e}d{\'e}rique Girard and Caroline Floccia and Jeremy Goslin},
  journal={British Journal of Development Psychology},
  year={2008},
  volume={26},
  pages={409-433}
}
This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5- to 6-year-old French-speaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in… 
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Perception of foreign-accented words was assessed in four- to seven-year-old children to test how one form of variability influences word recognition in children, and it was demonstrated that children had less accurate word recognition than adults for both native- and foreign- ACented words.
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The findings suggest that although the strength of accent-based social preferences can be modulated by the type of accent, these preferences still persist in the face of significant diversity in children’s accent exposure.
Children's Use of Semantic Context in Perception of Foreign-Accented Speech.
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    Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR
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Despite significant acoustic-phonetic deviations from native norms, young children capitalize on contextual cues when presented with foreign-accented speech.
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